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Re-presenting the Paralympics: (contested) philosophies, production practices and the hypervisibility of disability
journal contribution
posted on 2019-04-17, 12:09 authored by Emma PullenEmma Pullen, Daniel Jackson, Michael Silk, Richard ScullionStudies that have engaged parasport broadcasting, particularly through a narrative lens, have almost exclusively relied on textual and/or content analysis of the Paralympic Games as the source of cultural critique. We know far less about the decisions taken inside Paralympic broadcasters that have led to such representations. In this study – based on interviews with senior production and promotion staff at the United Kingdom’s Paralympic broadcaster, Channel 4 – we provide the first detailed examination of mediated parasport from this vantage point. We explore the use of promotional devices such as athletes’ backstories – the ‘Hollywood treatment’ – to both hook audiences and serve as a vehicle for achieving its social enterprise mandate to change public attitudes towards disability. In so doing, we reveal myriad tensions that coalesce around representing the Paralympics, with respect to the efforts made to balance the competing goals of key stakeholders and a stated desire to make the Paralympics both a commercial and socially progressive success.
Funding
Arts and Humanities Research Council. Grant reference: AH/p003842/1
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Media, Culture and SocietyVolume
41Issue
4Pages
465 - 481Citation
PULLEN, E. ... et al, 2019. Re-presenting the Paralympics: (contested) philosophies, production practices and the hypervisibility of disability. Media, Culture and Society, 41 (4), pp.465-481.Publisher
SAGE Publications © The AuthorsVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2018-09-14Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Media, Culture and Society and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443718799399.ISSN
0163-4437eISSN
1460-3675Publisher version
Language
- en